Installing Windows onto external drive - Atari’s doc not working for me

[stirrell]

Hello all,

 

I had installed Windows onto an external USB drive following Atari’s official documentation a while back. It worked fine but the free software they recommended (Win2USB) has been updated and I have since been unable to get a working copy installed on the drive. The step to install as a virtual drive seems to now be missing (or I don’t see it). Is there an alternate program that could be used for the same purpose or does anyone else have another method they would recommend? The Windows installer will not install onto an external USB drive.

 

Thanks!

[stirrell]

I also tried to format my internal M2 drive using diskpart in the Windows setup command line. Windows then saw the drive as available to install Windows on but failed almost immediately with a generic message that didn’t give me much to go on.

[stirrell]

Update on this - I saw on the Discord chat that someone recommended using Rufus instead of WinToUSB to create the external drive for Windows. Not only was it super simple (I changed the option from a regular Windows install to Windows to Go and that was it) but it also did not partition the drive the way that Atari's method did. So all the space is available on the main drive. If you need to install Windows on your VCS, I definitely recommend giving Rufus a try. You just need an external drive and a Windows ISO (and a computer to run Rufus on). I went with Windows 11 and it installed fine.